The failure of John Carter

This week has seen Walt Disney announce that the company expects to lose around £125million on the film John Carter. Disney shares dropped by over 1% in the wake of the announcement that the film was one of the biggest flops in cinema history. The loss isn't a huge issue for Disney as there TV business is going well so they will still turn a profit this quarter and also have The Avengers film (previewed here: The Avengers Preview) coming out in May which is expected to be a box office smash.

Let's look at why the film failed to win fans at the box office, well the big problem it seems is that it's a boring film with terrible characters. Mark Kermode reviewed the film by saying "The story telling is incomprehensible, the characterisation is ludicrous, the story is two and a quarter hours long and it's a boring, boring, boring two and a quarter hours long." Peter Bradshaw who is the Guardian newspaper film critic was equally scathing about the movie "John Carter is one of those films that is so stultifying, so oppressive and so mysteriously and interminably long that I felt as if someone had dragged me into the kitchen of my local Greggs, and was baking my head into the centre of a colossal cube of white bread."

The component parts seem to be there for this film to work, the original books by Edgar Rice Burroughs were popular and the director Andrew Stanton had worked on previous hits like Wall-E and Finding Nemo. Even the lead actor Taylor Kitsch is hugely popular in America after his role as Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights but unfortunately as many people have said before, a film is only as good as its script.